The
Bibliotheca Alexandrina(BA)
aspires to establish strong knowledge networks through Africa in order to expand the African innovation by using science and technology.

The idea is to use the internet not just to connect people or to seek the wisdom of the crowds by crowd-sourcing; it is rather about connecting people with common interests and expertise so that they can build on each other’s contributions and develop knowledge faster and share it immediately.

Facial recognition software is widely used to identify people and until recently it was one of the few areas where humans out-performed machines. Until about five years ago, the errors in machine identification of faces was about 25%, i.e. barely reaching 75% accuracy, while humans were in the range of 97.5% accuracy.
However, in the last few years, new developments in software have allowed machines to exceed the human accuracy level, and such software is now utilized by Baidu, Google Facenet, tencent bestimage, Deep ID3, all of which reach over 99.5% accuracy. Facebook’s software is now neck and neck with human accuracy levels and is being provided by the company to assist the Facebook user to keep track of your social network friends who show up in other pictures in other parts of the Internet.Continue Reading...

Ismail Serageldin
Director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina(BA)

Quotations

Ethnicity should enrich us; it should make us a unique people in our diversity and not be used to divide us.

- Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

To really serve humanity well, we need the powerful knowledge generated by the natural sciences to be supplemented by the insights of the social sciences and the wisdom of the humanities.

- Ismail Serageldin

We need to keep hope alive and strive to do better.

- Kofi Annan

We go into rural communities, and all we do - like has been done in this room [at TED] - is create the space. When these girls sit ... you unlock great leaders.

- Leymah Gbowee

No human is completely fearless.

- Wole Soyinka

I think that feeling that if one believed absolutely in any cause, then one must have the confidence, the self-certainty, to go through with that particular course of action.